Gardens of WaterAlan Drew,Bloomsbury, 12.99 poundsA devastating tremor and its seismic effect. Alan Drew’s debut novel, Gardens of Water, is centred on two families, two different cultures, and the earthquake of 1999 that rocked western Turkey. Sinan Basioglu and wife Niloufer have just celebrated their son’s coming-of-age circumcision ceremony when their world is torn apart. Nine-year-old Ismail is seen floating out the window “as if on a pillow of air”, and cannot be found for three days. When he is located under rubble, it transpires that he was kept alive by their Christian missionary neighbour — Sarah Roberts — who gave her life to save him.A Kurdish refugee, Sinan despises the Americans and loathes the fact that he is now in their debt. His hatred grows when he is compelled to move to a Christian American camp run by his surviving neighbour, Marcus. He suspects that the grieving widower is trying to convert Ismail in an attempt to redeem his wife’s deathThe other reason he feels helpless is that the relocation allows his 15-year-old daughter, Irem, an opportunity to fall in love with Dylan, the forbidden foreign boy who lived in the flat above theirs. With both fathers caught up in despondency — one in grief over the death of his wife and the other over the lack of dignity of being in exile — the children are free to break all taboos and forge a relationship. Rock music and the lyrics of Radiohead further allow them to block out a world. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Drew is beautifully deft when it comes to details. Nuances, mores and characters are clearly spelt out. Ismail’s vivid description of facing death, for instance, is startlingly wise: “I’m curled up and the space keeps getting smaller and my leg and arms get squeezed tighter and tighter and I can’t breathe. It feels heavy and dark and lonely, and my bones hurt.” Irem, on the other hand, is the personification of the conflict that is dividing Turkey, where the past and the present rest uneasily together. She questions her lack of freedom, the fact that in her culture a woman’s maturing — her period — is marked with unease, while her brother’s is a cause for celebration. Irem wants to wear her hair loose, find happiness and lead a life that’s free.But the definition is most acute with Sinan. A simple man, his battle between the religious values he inherited versus his love for his children is elaborately shaded. He is not equipped to handle a wayward daughter who challenges everything he has held sacred. He comes to the point of violence but in the end he cannot follow through. And yet he has to deal with the tragic consequences of that choice. The anger surfaces again with the American only to be quelled when he realises Marcus is only human — just like Sinan.It helps that Drew was in Turkey during the quake and worked in a refugee camp but what makes Gardens of Water an extraordinary debut is the overwhelming sense of isolation in each page. You hear the thoughts of the characters more than their conversation. And silence punctuates their lives.
